Andrew Bujalski Talks About the Look of His ‘Computer Chess’

Andrew Bujalski likes it vintage. He has been making small, talky 16-millimeter films for the past decade, even as the industry has become progressively more digital. Over the years, Mr. Bujalski was asked why he hadn’t joined much of the indie world in shooting his movies on digital video. This contrarian responded with his latest feature, “Computer Chess,” which is about as video as video gets, but not in the way his questioners may have had in mind.

The movie, which takes place in an unspecified late-1970s, early-'80s haze, follows the goings-on at a tournament for chess software programmers. It was shot with a 1969 camera to create a movie that feels like a relic of a distant time.

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The cinematographer Matthias Grunsky.Credit
Wiley Wiggins

“In some sense, I’m baby stepping into the present by moving from 1930s technology to 1960s technology,” Mr. Bujalski said, speaking by phone from Austin, Tex., where he shot the film. Here Mr. Bujalski and his longtime cinematographer, Matthias Grunsky, explain how they created the look of “Computer Chess.”

Keeping an Eye To the Analog

The filmmakers used a Sony AVC-3260 video camera, which uses tubes to convert images to electronic signals. (Contemporary cameras use more compact image sensors.) The inspiration was a documentary by Michael Almereyda on the photographer William Eggleston, partly shot with an old Sony. “Before I knew I wanted to make a movie about computer chess programmers, I just had the fantasy of making a movie on the old black-and-white, analog tube cameras,” Mr. Bujalski said.

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Credit
Wiley Wiggins

But that created difficulty. For instance, those cameras recorded on three-quarter-inch tape, but decks that play those tapes are difficult to come by. Both the decks and the tape would have been impractical. So the camera had to be retrofitted. “I ripped off everything from the camera that wasn’t really the camera,” Mr. Grunsky, said by phone. Alterations included switching out the viewfinder and sending the video signal to a digital converter. The images were ultimately recorded on a hard drive.

The costume designer Colin Wilkes and production designer Michael Bricker helped create the film’s dated ambience. But a lot of that texture came from the analog video images. For example, tube cameras often leave a light trail. When the camera is pointed at a bright light source and pans away quickly, the light stays burned into the image and slowly fades. “There’s something ghostlike about it,” Mr. Bujalski said, “something that makes everything look ghostly. It seemed like a fine metaphor for all of moviemaking. It is all recordings of ghosts.” He found the effect particularly useful for a period piece.

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Patrick Riester in "Computer Chess."Credit
Kino Lorber

The camera lent character to the scenes through other visual distortions, like erratic waves in the frame or strange lines that appear amid too much contrast. “You would get electronic noise by touching the camera on a certain spot,” Mr. Grunsky said. “I would provoke that sometimes.”

Hardware From History

The tournament scenes feature a variety of computers from the era in all their bulky glory. Mr. Bujalski gathered some of the equipment from private collections. “But the majority of the computers that we use came from a place called the Goodwill Computer Museum,” he said. The museum, in Austin, is affiliated with the nonprofit Goodwill Industries and displays old machines donated over the years.

Many of them still worked, and some cast members had experience with computer programming, so they helped create what looked like chess software using early languages like Basic. The team brought in advisers like Russ Corley from the museum to make the consoles look functional. Mr. Bujalski added that “there’s no lack of such nerdly information on the Internet, if you’re looking for it.” In certain cases, the crew remotely fed information to a terminal from an off-screen laptop.

A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2013, on Page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Video, Yes; High-Def, No. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe